Fishing aid need not be all at sea

There’s been great merriment – and some horror – this summer at the revelation of a British aid project that set out to find mates for an endangered fish in Madagascar; the search for female Mangarahara cichlids for a lonely male cost the taxpayer £3,400.

And, perhaps more seriously, aid has been squandered on building high-tech landing sites in coastal villages on the world’s fourth largest non-continental island, because no-one had taken the trouble to check whether the local fishermen actually wanted to use them (they didn’t).

But not all help given to Madagascar’s fisheries has proved to be so entirely at sea, as a new paper published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One demonstrates. It shows that when aid is applied on a small scale to meet local people’s real needs – and, above all, in close cooperation with them – it can have extroardinary effects.

For the last twelve years, as the study describes it, a small British charity, Blue Ventures Conservation, has been working closely with with fisherpeople in the remote southwest of the island – with some help from local and international organisations and the African Development Bank – to boost octopus catches. It has been so successful that the charity has received one of this years $1.25 million Skoll Awards, the world’s premier recognition for “social entrepreneurs”.

The local Vezo people subsist, on average, on $1.72 a day, well below the $2 a day official poverty line, and depend on fishing. After detailed discussions with the charity .and in village meetings, they decided to institute a series of two to three month closures of just a fifth of their octopus fishing areas, to give stocks time to recover. Just a single, experimental such closure, in 2004, has so far been followed by more than 100 others along the southwest coast.

The results, the study shows, have been dramatic. Octopus catches in the month after the closures – carried out under traditional laws, and enforced by the local communities themselves – are seven times as great, on average, as in the month immediately before them. Partly this is down to a big influx of fishers to the newly reopened areas, but – even so – individual catches almost doubled. Average incomes shot up by over 130 per cent, and did not fall significantly during the closure periods because the people then directed their efforts to the 80 per cent of their areas that remained open.

The smaller a project is, and the more closely it involves local people, the more successful it is likely to be

And the villagers have been so pleased with the results that they have gone on to adopt other conservation measures, such as setting up an officially managed area of about a thousand square kilometres of sea, banning destructive fishing practices, and setting up six "no-take zones" where all fishing is banned (a measure they had initially rejected as too ambitious).

The contrast between this success story, and the failure of the high tech landing sites, illustrates a simple truth: the smaller scale and more grassroots a project is – and, above all, the more it involves local people, seeks to met their expressed needs, and builds on traditional practices – the more successful it is likely to be.

The trouble is that official aid agencies - and recipient governments – tend to be drawn to the big and grandiose. And as aid budgets rise – and the number of people administering them shrink through cuts – there is an even stronger temptation to concentrate on bigger projects.

In fairness, ministers appear to be aware of the dangers. International Development Secretary Justine Greening, an accountant by training, has sought to make individual civil servants more accountable for particular projects. And Grant Shapps, the new aid minister, is working on a village-level decentralised energy project that is likely to revolutionise millions of lives worldwide. Watch this space….